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Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion
Available in English for the first time, a masterwork by Enrique Dussel, one of the world's foremost philosophers, and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop.
- GenresPhilosophy
741 pages, Unknown Binding
First published November 1, 2003
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About the author
Enrique Dussel
206 books134 followersENRIQUE DUSSEL nace el 24 de diciembre de 1934, en el pueblo de La Paz, Mendoza, Argentina. Exiliado político desde 1975 en México, hoy ciudadano mexicano, es profesor en el Departamento de Filosofía en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM, Iztapalapa, ciudad de México), y en el Colegio de Filosofía de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM (Ciudad Universitaria). Licenciado en filosofía (Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina), doctor en filosofía por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, doctor en historia en La Sorbonne de Paris y una licencia en teología en Paris y Münster. Ha obtenido doctorados honoris causa en Freiburg (Suiza) y en la Universidad de San Andrés (La Paz, Bolivia). Fundador con otros del movimiento Filosofía de la Liberación. Trabaja especialmente el campo de la Ética y la Filosofía Política.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 2, 2022
No review could do it justice- this is maybe the best book on philosophy/ethics I have ever read.
This book begins with a sweeping new world history/world systems analysis that decenters and destabilizes a Eurocentric understanding of world history. Dussel does so because, “The ethics of liberation must first of all undertake a reflection regarding the geopolitical implantation of philosophy itself” (40). The aim and goal of this history, (see [1] and [55]), is to situate the ethical problematic within a global horizon through proper historical sequence and analysis of historical contents in order to remove the problematic from its Helleno- and Eurocentric interpretation. Dussel's claim: Historicity conditions ethical-material and formal-moral levels. Counterdiscourses must be included (periphery). Dussel gives four stages of the interregional world system and its shifting center's ranging from 1. Egypt-Mesopotamia 2. Indo-European (Persian Center) 3. Asiastic-Afro-Mediterranean 4. contemporary world system.
Turning to the body of the work, the book is split up into two fundamental sections: Part One- The Foundations of Ethics and Part Two- Critical Ethics, Antihegemonic Validity, and the Praxis of Liberation. The first part examines the key big players of all modern ethics: Kant, Hegel, Hume, Mills, Smith, Kant, MacIntyre, Taylor, Rawls, Habermas, Apel, Charles Pierce, William James, Hilary Putnam. Its scope and depth is simply jaw dropping. Dussel moves from examining the material moment of ethics, the formal/intersubjective moment of ethics, and the practical/feasible moment. In the Part Two, Dussel argues for a critical ethics rooted in the exteriority of the victims of the current system. Doing so he subsumes all of modern ethics and orients it towards liberation. In this section Dussel uses: Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Levinas, Freud, Freire, Bloch, Lenin, Luxemburg and more. Again, the scope of interaction and the depth of analysis and synthesis are jam dropping.
A good summary of the book, if one is even possible, is found at the very end in Dussel's articulation of the "Liberation Principle," as the principle that subsumes all other ethical principles. Dussel writes:
The liberation principle can be described more or less as follows: one who operates in an ethical-critical manner should (is ethically obligated to) act to liberate the victim, as part (either by “location” or by “positioning,” according to Gramsci) of the same community to which the victim belongs, by means of (a) a feasible transformation of the moments (norms, acts, microstructures, institutions, or ethical systems) that produce the material negativity at issue (which impede a certain aspect of the reproduction of life) or its formal discursivity (a certain asymmetry or exclusion with regard to participation) for the victim; and (b) the construction, through mediations with strategic-instrumental critical feasibility, of new norms, actions, microstructures, institutions, or even complete ethical systems, where such victims could live, as full and equal participants. What is at issue here as I have highlighted previously is a “qualitative historical advance”319 or development. This obligation has a claim of universality; which is to say that it would exert its sway in every human act or situation. This liberatory interest is grounded in the regulatory idea of a society without victims (notwithstanding the empirical impossibility of such a society) and, concretely (and this is empirically possible) without this specific historical type of victim; each of these victims is empirically responsible for, and must struggle on behalf of, this society without their kind of victim, in order to make their liberation possible. The liberatory interest thus has a driving force and opens up the horizon of this obligation, undertaken by liberating reason (practical-material320 ethical- critical reason, characterized by a consensual, strategic, and instrumental discourse). Furthermore, it must be taken into account that the practical positive fulfillment of this principle, or of its more aptly termed praxis of liberation, always has the critical community of victims as a referent for the construction of its sociohistorical subjectivity—whatever might be the visage with which it is revealed—and the community of victims always bears the bur- den of responsibility for this, as a self-liberating act undertaken by a specific sociohistorical subject. (p. 420-421).
This book begins with a sweeping new world history/world systems analysis that decenters and destabilizes a Eurocentric understanding of world history. Dussel does so because, “The ethics of liberation must first of all undertake a reflection regarding the geopolitical implantation of philosophy itself” (40). The aim and goal of this history, (see [1] and [55]), is to situate the ethical problematic within a global horizon through proper historical sequence and analysis of historical contents in order to remove the problematic from its Helleno- and Eurocentric interpretation. Dussel's claim: Historicity conditions ethical-material and formal-moral levels. Counterdiscourses must be included (periphery). Dussel gives four stages of the interregional world system and its shifting center's ranging from 1. Egypt-Mesopotamia 2. Indo-European (Persian Center) 3. Asiastic-Afro-Mediterranean 4. contemporary world system.
Turning to the body of the work, the book is split up into two fundamental sections: Part One- The Foundations of Ethics and Part Two- Critical Ethics, Antihegemonic Validity, and the Praxis of Liberation. The first part examines the key big players of all modern ethics: Kant, Hegel, Hume, Mills, Smith, Kant, MacIntyre, Taylor, Rawls, Habermas, Apel, Charles Pierce, William James, Hilary Putnam. Its scope and depth is simply jaw dropping. Dussel moves from examining the material moment of ethics, the formal/intersubjective moment of ethics, and the practical/feasible moment. In the Part Two, Dussel argues for a critical ethics rooted in the exteriority of the victims of the current system. Doing so he subsumes all of modern ethics and orients it towards liberation. In this section Dussel uses: Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Levinas, Freud, Freire, Bloch, Lenin, Luxemburg and more. Again, the scope of interaction and the depth of analysis and synthesis are jam dropping.
A good summary of the book, if one is even possible, is found at the very end in Dussel's articulation of the "Liberation Principle," as the principle that subsumes all other ethical principles. Dussel writes:
The liberation principle can be described more or less as follows: one who operates in an ethical-critical manner should (is ethically obligated to) act to liberate the victim, as part (either by “location” or by “positioning,” according to Gramsci) of the same community to which the victim belongs, by means of (a) a feasible transformation of the moments (norms, acts, microstructures, institutions, or ethical systems) that produce the material negativity at issue (which impede a certain aspect of the reproduction of life) or its formal discursivity (a certain asymmetry or exclusion with regard to participation) for the victim; and (b) the construction, through mediations with strategic-instrumental critical feasibility, of new norms, actions, microstructures, institutions, or even complete ethical systems, where such victims could live, as full and equal participants. What is at issue here as I have highlighted previously is a “qualitative historical advance”319 or development. This obligation has a claim of universality; which is to say that it would exert its sway in every human act or situation. This liberatory interest is grounded in the regulatory idea of a society without victims (notwithstanding the empirical impossibility of such a society) and, concretely (and this is empirically possible) without this specific historical type of victim; each of these victims is empirically responsible for, and must struggle on behalf of, this society without their kind of victim, in order to make their liberation possible. The liberatory interest thus has a driving force and opens up the horizon of this obligation, undertaken by liberating reason (practical-material320 ethical- critical reason, characterized by a consensual, strategic, and instrumental discourse). Furthermore, it must be taken into account that the practical positive fulfillment of this principle, or of its more aptly termed praxis of liberation, always has the critical community of victims as a referent for the construction of its sociohistorical subjectivity—whatever might be the visage with which it is revealed—and the community of victims always bears the bur- den of responsibility for this, as a self-liberating act undertaken by a specific sociohistorical subject. (p. 420-421).
July 7, 2024
Quite a dense book.
July 13, 2021
A monumental presentation of what Dussel claims is the mere "architecture" of an ethics of liberation, developed through constant exposition and criticism of alternative ethical positions in comparison with his own. The book is organized in two parts with three chapters each. Part I develops an account of the necessary foundations of any actual ethics, that is, a mode of lived human reality: a material claim to advance the reproduction and qualitative development of human life, a formal claim to consensus within the community involved, and a feasibility claim to in fact achieve the good, in the terms purportedly agreed upon, resulting in human flourishing. Part II revisits each of these in turn from, Dussel submits, the perspective of the victims. (Any and every ethics produces victims, Dussel says; but he is particularly concerned with the victims produced in our neoliberal capitalist "age of globalization and exclusion.")
Perhaps the most important contribution here is Dussel's attempt to re-establish ethics upon a reintegration of fact and value. (As Charles Taylor has argued in Sources of the Self, the result of the fact-value split has been a pervasive modern ethical inarticulacy.) Dussel refuses to accept that there is no rational passage from statements of what is to statements of what ought to be. He grounds his attempt in an account of basic biological processes as valuational processes, and of human biology as embracing and embraced in human cultures. I wish Dussel were clearer here, but I will certainly be re-reading those arguments.
Three stars because Dussel is prone to over-write, and the core argument could be much more clear and explicit. (Admission: I have not yet read the first appendix, which presents "Some Theses in Order of Appearance in the Text," which may mitigate this criticism.) But in general, my experience of Dussel is that he is prone to a great deal 0f over-writing. There are 200 pages of end notes, for instance. Also, a debt of gratitude is owed to the five heroic members of the translation team. Still, there are clear inconsistencies and infelicities throughout the book, in small matters at least--which makes me wonder if there may be some flaws in larger matters, too.
Perhaps the most important contribution here is Dussel's attempt to re-establish ethics upon a reintegration of fact and value. (As Charles Taylor has argued in Sources of the Self, the result of the fact-value split has been a pervasive modern ethical inarticulacy.) Dussel refuses to accept that there is no rational passage from statements of what is to statements of what ought to be. He grounds his attempt in an account of basic biological processes as valuational processes, and of human biology as embracing and embraced in human cultures. I wish Dussel were clearer here, but I will certainly be re-reading those arguments.
Three stars because Dussel is prone to over-write, and the core argument could be much more clear and explicit. (Admission: I have not yet read the first appendix, which presents "Some Theses in Order of Appearance in the Text," which may mitigate this criticism.) But in general, my experience of Dussel is that he is prone to a great deal 0f over-writing. There are 200 pages of end notes, for instance. Also, a debt of gratitude is owed to the five heroic members of the translation team. Still, there are clear inconsistencies and infelicities throughout the book, in small matters at least--which makes me wonder if there may be some flaws in larger matters, too.
October 9, 2014
I am very sympathetic to this project but this is a book to be studied and not read. Dussel is deeply invested in historical and contemporary arguments that I have very little interest in. He provides summarized theses at the end which will give you the overview.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews